Ontology-based Ethology Tools / News: Recent posts

I am aware that Snow Leopard has introduced difficulties for OwlWatcher and other applications using QuickTime from Java. I am currently planning to complete version 0.040 and then finding a solution to this. Although I expect I will find a solution, Quicktime will probably be replaced in the next Windows release, hopefully with something Linux friendly. I am currently looking at Rococoa as a possible approach to running OwlWatcher under OSX.

This is a release candidate for OwlWatcher 0.040, which is based on the Manchester OWLAPI. Please do not test this application with an existing data file without first making a backup. It has been tested, but is potentially not backwards compatible with versions 0.035 and 0.036. Please report any problems with this version by 31 May 2009 to Peter Midford (pmidford@users.sourceforge.net).

This is primarily a bug fix release for OSX; however the formatting of time display in the video player has been improved. There are also some updates to the manual on the project site (HTML and PDF).

I am happy to announce a new test version of OwlWatcher, in both OSX and Windows versions. There are a number of improvements to the user interface and to what you can do with the editor. See the release notes for details. I know people are using this tool, please don't hesitate to contact me with bug or feature requests. My contact information is in the release notes.

There is now a runnable Windows (XP tested) version of OwlWatcher. The code fixes for the two problems holding up this release are in SVN if you want the source for this.

This release provides a minimally functional behavior scoring tool: timestamps from the video track are correctly recorded and saved in the .owl data file. As important, for some, there is now an option to save files as .csv for import into your favorite conventional analysis software. Lots of other minor changes as well. Enjoy!

This release adds the ability to reload the project and ontology files generated during a session. It also marks the shift to using Java 1.5. I had hoped to delay this, but an Apple security patch broke Java QuickTime running with Java 1.4.2. Sorry.
I have not included the Demo Pack in this release, the Package from 0.015 will work fine with this version, though now you can add reloading to the little tour in the readme file.... read more

OwlWatcher has advanced to the stage that I believe
people can try it out, even though it is still a
long way from supporting serious recording and
analysis of behavior data. This release will play
video clips and allows counting of events as instances in a loaded OWL ontology. The user can
also create new classes within the ontology. These new classes and instances (with timestamps
from the video clip) can be saved to a new owl
file.... read more